Around 1999, Cardamone Alessandro was sitting in the Café du Louvre in Paris when he noticed a woman at another table. He never spoke to her. He made a sketch of the space and the figure in it, and that sketch became the origin of roughly seventy paintings. The series is called Femme au Café du Louvre, and it remains, by his own account, the body of work that gives him the most satisfaction to make. One of the most significant canvases from that group, a 2001 work catalogued as AC008B, was stolen during an exhibition in Italy. The police investigation is open. Lawyers and insurers are involved. He mentioned it twice in the interview, conducted in Italian, each time matter-of-factly, then moved on.
Cardamone, who lives and works in Ottiglio in the Piedmont region, has been painting since the late 1980s. He is self-taught, a fact he returns to with some regularity, though less as a badge of pride than as an explanation of method. Without an academy, he built his own framework. He calls it Modern Neo-Cubism: geometric deconstruction of form and perspective, layers of acrylic applied to canvas or, occasionally, to antique hand-prepared linens from his studio, the surface built up until it carries what he describes as a monumental permanence. The figures in his work are fractured and reassembled. Space and plane are broken apart simultaneously.
He is careful to distinguish his approach from historical Cubism. Where Picasso and Braque dismantled visual reality into analytical abstraction, Cardamone said his aim is to bring geometry back toward the human. Others have drawn the Picasso comparison for him — he mentioned it with a certain equanimity, as something that happens rather than something he courts. He also referenced Fernand Léger, noting the shared interest in bold outlines and geometric composition, though he was clear that his own work rehumanises the geometry rather than pushing it further toward abstraction. These are offered as points of orientation, not equivalence.
The Femme au Café du Louvre series is the clearest evidence of how his practice has changed over time. The early figures were more abstract. The recent ones are larger, more figurative, and what he calls more monumental. When asked what drove that shift, he didn't reach for a theory. He said the evolution happened across twenty-five years and that the figures simply became what they became. The colour, he said, is always the primary decision: he gives an almost singular tonality to the forms in the sketch first, then looks for equilibrium between colour and form.
To follow the series across its span is to watch a single formal problem deepen without resolving. Femme au Café du Louvre AC0057D05, made in 1993 — before the Paris visit that named the series, which complicates the chronology in a way Cardamone did not address directly — sits in the portfolio alongside Femme au Café du Louvre Code AC008BD05 from 2001, the work that was stolen, and Femme au Cafe du Louvre Code AC0040GD03 from 2010. All are acrylic on canvas. What the dossier records, and what Cardamone confirmed in the interview, is that the later works are physically larger and more figurative than the earlier ones — the woman becomes more present, more solidly occupying the pictorial space, even as the geometric deconstruction continues. The café setting, which began as a sketch of an environment, has become a recurring stage rather than a specific location.
"The equilibrium arrives suddenly," he said. "At least in my work, it arrives suddenly." He described a process that is partly patient and partly abrupt. A canvas begins from a sketch, sometimes made years earlier. He doesn't know when he starts what the final colour relationships will be. He works toward a balance, and then — in what he described as a single decisive moment, the change of one detail — the painting is finished. After that, he contemplates it, then tests it under different lights, at different distances, from different angles, before he allows himself the confirmation that it holds.
That confirmation matters to him. He was clear that the primary measure is his own eye, not an anticipated viewer. When he started painting, he said, he had no expectation that his work would leave his hands at all. His first sale, in Basel in 1996, left him uncomfortable. The paintings were too personal. He hadn't prepared himself to let them go. What changed, over the following years, was a recognition that the work was finding a response — in galleries, in exhibitions, across different audiences — and that recognition became a kind of external confirmation of what he already believed about the work's distinctiveness. He doesn't make work for a viewer, but he has become attentive to what viewers do with it. At his exhibitions, he asks visitors which painting they would take home. He said the attention distributes itself across all the series — the pre-Columbian references, the women on the beach, the women waiting, the café figures — without concentrating on any single work.
His career has moved through a range of institutional and commercial contexts. He showed in Basel in the late 1990s. In 2001, he was invited as a guest of honour to an international exhibition of young European artists in Mulhouse, France, showing alongside around 150 artists from across the continent; local press, according to the dossier, ran photographs exclusively of his works. In 2004, the Academy of Art at the Autonomous University of Madrid invited him to exhibit, and subsequently acquired a work for their collection. More recently, between 2023 and 2024, a major exhibition at the Hong Art Museum in Chongqing used his painting La Femme au Café du Louvre (AC0057) as the poster image for an event titled Transcendence: A Fusion of Art and Culture. His work has also entered corporate collections — DSM, Roche, and Sandoz are mentioned in the dossier — and has been displayed in Starwood Hotels properties, including the Pevero Golf Club in Costa Smeralda. These are not contexts he treats as separate from his artistic practice. He presents them as part of the same trajectory: a body of work that has moved through different environments and held its own in each.
The Mulhouse invitation in 2001 was, by his account, a turning point. He was still relatively unknown, and the event — a large-scale international gathering of young European artists — placed him in a context where the work had to stand on its own terms among peers from across the continent. He described it as an affirmation of his artistic identity, though he did not elaborate on what specifically was affirmed. What the dossier records is that the local press coverage focused on his work rather than the broader event, a detail he includes when describing the exhibition's significance to him.
In February 2026, a solo exhibition in Italy brought together more than seventy-four works across 11 rooms, covering 850 square metres — figures Cardamone gave directly when describing the event. It was at this exhibition that AC008B was taken. The work, valued at over €100,000 according to the dossier, was described by Cardamone as the painting that marked the true beginning of the Femme au Café du Louvre series — the one that came directly from the 1999 Paris sketch. He said the investigations are still ongoing.
The thematic range of his portfolio — pre-Columbian and African art references, women at the museum, women on terraces, women on beaches — is held together less by subject matter than by the same geometric logic applied differently across each. The female figure is the consistent centre, and Cardamone traces this back to lived observation: the woman in the Paris café, never identified, never approached, rendered first as a sketch and then, across decades, as a recurring formal problem. He has said explicitly that he consciously avoids depicting pain, solitude, or violence in his work, a choice he frames as deliberate and considered rather than as a limitation. The colours are meant to hold the eye before anything else does.
When asked where the practice is going, his answer was measured. He described an ongoing search for confirmation of a style he considers his own — not by repeating himself, but by continuing to develop within the same formal territory. The figures are becoming more monumental. The colour relationships are shifting. He confirmed the three threads identified at the close of the conversation: the sudden arrival of equilibrium between colour and form, the movement of the figure toward greater monumentality, and the distributed attention of audiences across his series. He offered no corrections.
"Grazie, arrivederci," he said, and closed the interview.
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